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Flight of Fancy
Flight of Fancy is a massively multiplayer flight simulation and travel game, produced by AM Studios. Gameplay Each player controls a customizable birdplane avatar in an open-ended journey around the world. The player character initially spawns in a randomly selected airport in one of the game's many worlds, each one directly based on a famous city. They are prompted to take off from the runway, and fly the route to the nearest other airport. These high-altitude flight sequences are the mode of transport between cities, and occur in place of fast travel: the average flight takes around 2 minutes of real time. In flight, players use airplane-like controls and aim for collectibles en route to their destination, while being affected by multiple pseudo-random events such as weather conditions. Upon landing, the massively multiplayer element of the game turns on. The player is encouraged to explore the destination city, spend money on souvenirs from the local stores, and meet up with friends. Cities are designed for a multitude of interaction patterns, such as navigation and player-driven exploration and races, with layouts to gradually become familiar with, and many obscure shortcut and side areas. The game has a real time–based clock system that cycles through a day every 10 minutes. List of cities List of flight events Development The flight system in Krexxal's Birds of a Feather planted the original inspiration for what would become Flight of Fancy: an open-ended 3D game in which players fly as birds, with flight being the primary mechanic and its own gameplay motivator. AgentMuffin later revisited the idea, combining it with airplane flights and the aesthetic of the sky as seen from a plane window. With the game's focus in place, he then designed a player character to match the gameplay, and posted the art on Discord to test for positive response to the design. At this time, Agent was still considering appropriate gameplay structures and secondary mechanics. The open-ended nature of the game was retained to avoid shifting the focus to redundant physical objectives, which Agent felt was the case with ''Super Mario Odyssey'', another game themed around world travel. Soon after choosing a title, official work on the game began. Real-life cities were used to create familiar urban playgrounds, and were similar in concept to the various city districts in Super Mario Urbex, albeit separated by flight sequences rather than being adjacent. Flights were added both for aesthetic appeal, and to extend the goal of visiting every city, for players wanting to do so. This led to the addition of flight events to vary the gameplay, a mechanic inspired by the randomized events in City Trial from Kirby Air Ride. The compressed day cycle was put in place to make sure that most players could experience all times of day, regardless of the consistency of their access to the game. A similar mechanic previously appeared in Life. Category:Games Category:Original Games Category:Online Games Category:MMO Games Category:Flight Simulator Category:Open World Games Category:Exploration Games Category:AgentMuffin Category:AM Studios